Wednesday, January 8, 2014

TTYU Retro: Why you shouldn't rush your writing

I wonder if any of you have had this experience: you feel the completion of a story coming, and you want to slam that baby out and submit it!!!!

I suspect most people have felt that urge at one time or another. Some of those same people may also have had the experience that once the work was submitted, they wished they could have changed something about it. I certainly have experienced this - once was enough for me to give myself a good hard kick and say, never do that again!

Every time I get toward the end of my revisions, I feel that sense of urgency and rush. I'll be pushing hard, but when it comes to getting the book out the door, I need to force myself to wait. I'll ask for one or two more readers. I'll give myself at least a week to step away and do other things before I come back to it and send it out (I think that's the minimum time, honestly).

If you are working on your own deadline, and particularly if you are trying to achieve something unique and distinctive, TAKE YOUR TIME. Yes, of course there are sometimes deadlines. Actual ones, where you
have to get the story out the door by a certain date or else. In that case, do your best to build in post-draft rest time to your schedule.

I have heard writing likened to trying to build a mountain out of marbles. If you actually think about the number of words in a work (my current novel is at about 125,000), and you think from a logical standpoint about the number of different patterns that can occur in a set of so many words, it's mind-blowing. I've been writing this book for more than a year now, and I'm still finding little subtle things to make it better. If you take the time to really sink in to your book, and to consider it on all its multiple levels - character, world, plot, theme, symbolism, chapter structure, paragraph structure, dialogue, syntax, lexical choice, metaphor, meter, etc., etc., two things will happen. First, you'll be amazed at the complexity of what you're working with, and second, you may be able to develop your sensitivities and abilities at each of these levels to achieve something new and really exciting.

You may hear the argument that you're over-thinking things. If you find yourself going over and over the same material and changing things with no consistent reasoning behind those changes, you may indeed be over-thinking things. But if you're changing something to conform to a larger structural pattern, that's different. If you're seeing resonances in your work that you haven't seen before, that's valuable.

You may also hear the argument that there's no point in being overly literary, and that's all silly unnecessary stuff because nobody really notices that stuff anyway. The fact is that even though we may not notice things consciously about the way we read, we can still feel them. How many of these things are absolutely necessary to comprehension and the success of the story? That's arguable - after all, people can do unusual things with the rules, and as long as the story itself holds up by other means, then the effect can still come across. But think about the way that people love to find inside jokes in movies, where if you happen to know about the right sorts of things, you'll find a little nugget in there just for you. People love that. And it takes time to know the right sort of things to add in, so that it will fit smoothly into the whole, and not seem added in or inexplicable. Besides which, putting in patterns which are literary is not about having to make the curtains blue to make people sad. It's about finding the patterns which fit into your work, not into some outside model of symbolism. Especially in a worldbuilding context, color symbolism may be totally different (in Varin, the color of grief is moon-yellow), so making curtains blue when everyone is sad might be just as silly as it sounds!

The point here is that if you don't take your time to let the details and patterns sink in, you might miss something really exciting. There is a point in creating a story where you may not be able to detect anything wrong - but there may still be opportunities available to raise the story further, and you wouldn't want to miss them.

11 comments:

I remember when I was in high school, I took this "block" class where our historical studies corresponded with our English lit studies. My history teacher kept saying to us, "Make connections. Make connections. Make connections."

For the longest time I had no idea what she meant!

Then I started writing, and suddenly it clicked--maybe not in the way my teacher intended, heh, but her motto suddenly became useful. Taking time to meditate upon two seemingly unrelated concepts or ideas--be they fictional or from real life--can suddenly inspire the creation of new characters, settings...opportunities to use literary techniques like symbolism, theme and whatnot. You find ways of tying things together and, as you say, creating resonance in your story. (I like to think of it as encouraging synergy.)

And sometimes--a lot of times--those opportunities can take a while to come to you. There's no rhyme or reason to when they occur; they just happen on their own and can't really be rushed to come about.

Lovely post. I know as a reader, I feel when a novel is missing something. It is lacking on one of those literary levels, and though I don't consciously know which, I can feel that something is missing. As a writer, I'm slightly more biased, but I try to feel my way through these different levels much as I might with another book. Thank you for sharing this wonderful post!

I used to do a lot of query critiques. One of the things I started noticing was that the query was signaling that there was a big problem in the story and that the story still had major problems that needed to be fixed. But the writer didn't want to hear that. The story was done and they wanted to rush it out the agent right now! Then they ended back in revisions again after they got all the rejections.

Yes, that certainly does happen. The question of a query reflecting a story is a very interesting one, and after a lot of query writing and reading I have an idea how those things can be reflected. I think Janice Hardy had a specific article on it once. Thanks for commenting!

A great point. I'm guilty as charged of this...the feeling that I need to get this out like now. Right now. Instant gratification, or in my case (before my publishing contract) rejection. =) I've learned to ignore the itch to query when I know it's not ready. I've learned to trust my instincts.

Liz, I think we all go through this, especially in early stages. But it remains a temptation even later. Even when I think it's ready, I hold myself back a bit and try for one last reader, and one last look.

This is so important to think about as you near the end of a story draft... or what you think is the final draft... and I think it might become especially difficult as you begin to get published and make a name for yourself, especially if a publication has asked for your story (like the point you are at, Juliette!). Rushing it might be why it's not uncommon to see decrease in quality in a second novel -- whereas with your first novel you've probably spent lots of time refining and bringing out everything you mentioned... thanks, this was very thoughtful and a great reminder...

I think you have to decide if one very good book is worth the time it takes, during which you might have put out several acceptable ones.

That's an individual choice - assuming you can make it a very good book. Regardless of all the advice out there, quality takes time. If your time is worth a lot of money, you can possibly get editors to take on part of the quality assurance (James Patterson?), and spend your time otherwise.

Some famous writers of the past were so heavily edited that they basically were rewritten. I think less of those authors when I find out - heavy editing should not be necessary for a professional.